Songs of Healing and Community

By Usha R. Balakrishnan

my childhood was experienced in New Delhi and Mumbai in a singing household; my mom sang all the time while doing cooking and house chores. She also always sang a quick healing verse to me whenever I fell ill. I did not know its meaning. It was in Sanskrit, dating back from 8 c.e.—one of many traditional songs I would learn as I started formal training in South Indian Classical Carnatic Vocal Music at age 4.

Singing has been with me all my life, and after I left India for America in 1985, I kept up my practice because it was a soothing reminder of my mom. I sang that same healing verse to my own children when they fell ill. But what I never expected was that it would become part of my love of community here in Iowa. It was December 2008: I sang that same healing verse to a retired physician-scientist (endocrinologist Dr. Bob Bar) when he was undergoing surgery. I had met Bob when he became part of an organization I had founded called CARTHA (Collaborative Arts in Research Translation for Human Advancement), a name and acronym coined after the Sanskrit word for “Doer.” Bob and I both shared a dedication to CARTHA’s mission of engaging individuals as Collaborative Doers for Humanity, and he encouraged me to keep exploring the intersections between singing and healthfulness.

That singing experience in 2008, and all that followed, changed everything for me. Ten years later, I conceived CARTHA’s Musicality in Parks initiative. My dream was to have a Singing Nook built in a local park to activate the healing aspect of music within us and broadly share that across communities in ways that foster cross-cultural friendships and build supportive community. Music has been known to have an influence on health and healing. Given the extent of pandemicdriven loss and grief burdens, it is imperative for each of us to thoughtfully propose and find new strategies to reduce the level of unresolved grief and to increase coping skills in our communities of many backgrounds. Of much importance to me is instilling joy and healing—especially among younger children, parents, and caregivers—because the pandemic has been especially hard on our younger generations. Singing Nooks are a crucial part of that goal: they offer musically-diverse spaces to foster the development of coping skills, creativity, and healing by connecting people intergenerationally and cross-culturally through music and memories.

My dream to have a Singing Nook in a local park is now a reality at Willow Creek Park in Iowa City, and CARTHA has begun to sponsor field trips to it for children of different ages. The first such gathering was in October 2021. The group was twelve twelve-year-old girls, many of them children of Sudanese and Congolese refugees under the care of Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County. On that chilly Iowa afternoon, I asked each of these girls to respond to the question: “What does music mean to you?” In their responses (pictured on this page), they wrote such connections as Dancing!, Confidence, A Way to Show Love and Emotions, and Stay Positive. The stunning variations in their responses made me recognize the value of additional programming. Since January 2022, we have developed with Tessa Musa and others, twohour “Inspiring Creativity” art workshops with musical/poetic guests, indoors and outdoors at the Singing Nook. For 2023, the partnership goal is to infuse the diversity of musicality throughout all of Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County’s programs!

In another new partnership with John Geyer and Kaite Ryan at Camp Courageous, CARTHA hosted this past fall the first two of many intergenerational musical gatherings for special needs children and adults at Rotary Music Park in Monticello. Humanities Iowa

image: Handwritten responses by children at Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County program to the question: What does music mean to you? Photo by Tessa Musa. Reproduced with permission.

board member Elizabeth Hoover de Galvez was in attendance on October 2 and shared, “at one point, after Usha sang a song in her mother tongue, Tamil, one of the teen campers confidently echoed back a line from the song in the unfamiliar language. It was a beautiful moment of music transcending language and culture and connecting two very different people.”

Every humanitarian project requires the coming together of kindred spirits in a curiouslyorchestrated confluence of time. With Nitin Karandikar leading the CARTHA-Iowa Corridor Sangeet (ICS) community collaborative, we have addressed loneliness through the sharing of childhood musical memories (including through free concert events featuring old/ new Bollywood songs). In addition to being

image: Group involved in the Camp Courageous program this past fall in Monticello. Photo by Seetha Nagarajan. Reproduced with permission.